Has anyone just decided Donald Trump is going to win?

For the record, here's the latest forecast from Nate Silver, who may or may not be the best forecaster, but is definitely the sanest: "The forecast is holding steady and the race is well within toss-up range. Harris leads by 1.2 points in our national polling average, and Donald Trump has a 54 percent chance of winning the Electoral College." This, not the vibes, definitely sounds right to us. We would put his chances somewhere between 51 and 55%. Which is good! We would definitely call at those odds. But your correspondent will not be surprised if we wake up the day after the election and Kamala Harris is the President-elect.

Anyway: the media world is atwitter because Jeff Bezos, in a rare intervention in the Washington Post's editorial, nixed a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris by the Washington Post and defended the decision with an op-ed pointing out a screaming reality: the news media is the least-trusted institution in America, beating out prostitutes and even Congress (bah-dum-tss!). This came alongside reports and rumors that Bezos is planning in some ways to shift the Post's editorial line "to the right", which presumably means not "right-wing", but just "less incandescently left-wing." (We were able to independently confirm some of the rumors.)

Apparently, USA Today has also decided not to endorse. There have also been reports of Big Tech CEOs reaching out to the Trump campaign to say they want to do a better job of not-censoring conservatives.

The prevailing interpretation, at least on X dot com, seems to be this: everyone is assuming Trump will win, and so they are positioning themselves to be seen in a good light by the Trump Administration.

Maybe.

Jeff Bezos's political trajectory has been interesting. For the longest time, he described himself as a libertarian (which may or may not be code for conservative). When discussing his personal story as an adoptee gone from a broken world into a loving stable family, he would go on soliloquies about the importance of stable families. During a famous hearing, when Big Tech CEOs babbled and fumbled when asked whether they thought of their companies as American, he had no problem instantly and loudly proclaiming Amazon to be a patriotic American company (is it because AWS competes for Pentagon contracts? Sure, in part, but then again so do the other guys.).

Anyway, some time during or after the Summer of Floyd, he pivoted to, at least publicly, support for BLM and other fashionable progressive causes. As Amazon (both the retail arm and AWS) becomes larger and larger, politics becomes more important to its business, and the public perception of Jeff Bezos plays a role there, whether he wants to or not. Amazon Prime invested more and more into original content, which meant Bezos became a player in Hollywood, which does not reward deviations from left-wing orthodoxy, to put it mildly. Meanwhile, as owner of the Washington Post, as he crossed his heart and proclaimed not to interfere in editorial (a promise which, as far as we know, was kept), he set a business goal to increase the readership, famously proclaiming that newspapers had to pivot from a business model of generating lots of revenue from few subscribers, to generating a little revenue from lots of subscribers. What he may not have envisioned is that "editorial independence" sounds wonderful in theory, but in practice, in the current world, with the reality of the politics of the average 22 year old journalist, meant letting the inmates run the nuthouse. While the New York Times managed to maintain some sort of quality to the paper (albeit peddling conspiracy theories about Trump and generally showing its biases), in spite of maintaining some good people on staff, the Washington Post largely descended into a left-wing clickbait factory. In his op-ed, Bezos wrote of his refusal to "allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance."

Putting all of that together, it's not hard to understand why Jeff Bezos became a bête noire of the right, though your correspondent has always privately suspected that his true beliefs were a lot more moderate, if not sometimes right-leaning, than his PR has suggested these past few years.

It's hard to think of a situation where there is more alignment between Jeff Bezos's putative moderate worldview, his putative goal of maintaining influence in Republican DC, the long-term business interests of the Washington Post company, and the disinterested goal of making the Washington Post a better paper. Each of those calls for, well, owning the libs.

We are hardly unbiased here: we have been constantly talking and writing about how we started Sphere Media from the realization that smart decisionmakers—the natural audience of a paper like the Washington Post—were ill-served by far-left legacy media, and tired of it, and looking for intelligent non-far-left media, which is in very short supply. If we can smell a business opportunity, Jeff Bezos certainly can.

One should never underestimate Jeff Bezos's determination, but if this moment of alleged soul-searching by the media is prompted by the feeling of an impending Trump victory, we must confess to not being optimistic, even if President Trump does win.

Our subscribers may recall that, after the shock result of the 2016 election, there was already a moment of soul-searching by the liberal elite. Poor working-class people in the heartland had been suffering, they had been ignored, and the people running the country were seized by an urge to try to understand their struggles better and, if possible, remedy them. This moment made a man named JD Vance into a national celebrity.

It also lasted no more than fifteen minutes.

In a healthy country, particularly a healthy democracy, this should be what occurs: when there is a sustained populist backlash, the people in charge should conclude that, by definition (or else the idea of democracy is meaningless) they have gone wrong, at least in some places, and seek to rectify their behavior and meaningfully alter their policies. Not completely. Not by giving in to the mob on every issue. But in a serious and meaningful way.

The only other path is the path of the French aristocracy in the 18th century.

And yet they have consistently failed to do so. They simply have too many capital—ideological capital, and in many cases financial capital as well—invested in the current system. We hope we are wrong. But, thus far, we see no evidence otherwise.

Our forecast is that if President Trump does win, the soul-searching in the media and in Democratic circles will last for fifteen minutes, and then it will be business as usual.

Policy News You Need To Know

#Media — Speaking of media failing at soul-searching, it appears that the New York Times, using "research" by the highly partisan left-wing pressure group Media Matters, is working on an exposé alleging that conservatives are "spreading disinformation" online, and in particular on Big Tech platforms, presumably with the goal of pressuring those platforms to demonetize and deplatform conservatives.

#Media — Speaking of, a telltale incident just happened: Ryan Girdusky, a political consultant and author of the excellent National Populism newsletter, and until yesterday a part-time talking head at CNN, was in a heated debate at a roundtable with the notorious far-left and Israel-hating Mehdi Hasan. Objecting to Hasan's characterization of Trump supporters as Nazis, Girdusky shot back: "Well, I hope your beeper doesn't go off." Girdusky's point was obvious, and correct: the same standards that would allow calling Trump supporters Nazis would allow calling Hasan a Hizbullah terrorist. Instead of taking the point, CNN fired Girdusky.

#Media — Meanwhile… The Manhattan Institute's excellent Logos Initiative, which funds investigative reporters under the tutelage of Chris Rufo, has recruited two more reporters. We should expect a renewal of American journalism more from such initiatives than from a Road-to-Damascus experience at places like the New York Times and CNN.

#Healthcare — Don't worry, this hasn't turned into a media newsletter. The biggest news in policy this week may be the release of a big new report on healthcare by the Niskanen Center. Healthcare reform is the sad stepchild of American politics. Everyone dislikes their healthcare, but the subject has become politically toxic for both parties. Democrats don't want to admit that Obamacare isn't working that well, and Republicans don't want to admit that Obamacare isn't working that badly (and that they have no idea how to replace it). Lawson Mansell, the author of the report, however, has a very interesting idea: go at the supply side. Increase the supply of healthcare, and many good things will follow. "Our policy recommendations for healthcare abundance follow 3 major themes: Expand the supply of physicians, increase hospital capacity, and realign incentives to increase competition and reduce ineffective spending." More analysis soon. In the meantime, go read it.

#Natalism — Fertility in England hits record low (TFR: 1.44), falling faster than any other G7 country.

#Housing — Interesting and potentially important new NBER paper flagged by Lyman Stone: people are willing to pay more to live in less dense neighborhoods. The YIMBY crowd likes to paint NIMBYism as purely motivated by greed, or else dark evil forces, but they fail to grasp that people simply prefer to live in low-density areas. The reason for why that is should be elucidated by a long hike through a patch of beautiful countryside. This isn't to say that we should never allow any new housing anywhere, of course, just that the people agitating for low-density housing are simply acting based on a legitimate preference, and that as both a substantive and a political matter, YIMBYs who fail to take that into account will keep shooting themselves in the foot.